Ted Hughes- biographical info
Born August 17th, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, his family moved to Mexborough when he was seven to run a newspaper stand and tobacco shop. He also attended Mexborough grammar school, and wrote his first poems from the age of fifteen, some of which made their way into the school magazine.
His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year he graduated from Cambridge. He used two false names for his early publications, Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew.
From 1955 to 1956, he worked as a rose gardener, night-watchman, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and reader for J. Arthur Rank, and planned to teach in Spain then emigrate to Australia. Hughes was also one of six producers of the literary magazines, St. Botolph's review, which was first launched on February 26. Hughes also met Sylvia Plath that day, and four months later, they were married.
Hughe's published his first book of poems, Hawk in the Rain, in 1957 and won the Harper publication contest.
Some of the awards Hughes received are the:
Harper publication contest, Guiness Poetry Award, Guggenheim fellowship, Somerset Maughan award, city of Florence International Poetry Prize, Premio Internazionale Taormina Prize, Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, OBE, vote for the best writing in English in the New Poetry Poll, Whitbread Book of the Year, W.H. Smith Literature award, Forward Prize for Poetry, Queen’s Order of Merit, T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, South Bank Award for Literature, Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Book of the Year again.
Ted Hughe's wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, after their separation in 1962. Some hold Hughes responsible for her death because of his many affairs, one of which was with Assia Wevill. Hughes was publicly silent on the subject for more than 30 years out of his sense of responsibility to protect his two children.
Quotes
‘Each image denotates another, so that the whole poem throbs’ – Edward Lucie Smith on Hughes’ poetry, British Poetry since 1945
imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which you are merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday- and things which are a deep part of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated from?’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are.’-Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
· TedHughes studied first English and then anthropology and archaeology. This created an interest in mythological systems which grew into a fascination with astrology, shamanism and hermeticism, these topics also had an influence upon his poetry.
· The death of his wife Sylvia influenced ted to write a series of poems on death
His love of animals
Style
· Usually written contrary to the prevailing style, Hughes's work has always been controversial.
· In Literary Review, Carol Bere says, "He has been dismissed as a connoisseur of the habits of animals, his disgust with humanity barely disguised; labeled a 'voyeur of violence,' attacked for his generous choreographing of gore; and virtually written off as a cult poet. . . . Others admire him for the originality and command of his approach; the scope and complexity of his mythic enterprise; and the apparent ease and freshness with which he can vitalize a landscape, free of any mitigating sentimentality."
· Shaw, "Hughes's enterprise is to examine the isolated and precarious position of man in nature and man's chances of overcoming his alienation from the world around him. In pursuit of these interests Hughes focuses frequently (and often brilliantly) upon animals."
The Minotaur by Ted HughesThe mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.
That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.
'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,
'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?
The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.
Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.
Minotaur could be compared to the myth of Thesius, and Ted Hughes used this poem to make a translation of the play. Hughe's stresses Phedre's pathological disorder by saying ; "She no longer anguishes and burns, as in Racine, but has now become possessed, and sickens for Thesius."
I think that the poem Minotaur can be compared to the myth of Thesius, where he has relations with his mother. My main reasoning for this is the last stanza, "left your mother a dead end, brought you to the horned, bellowing grave of your risen father, and your own corpse in it." The last two lines signify that he is acting in the place of his father, because he is having relations with his mother.
Theology by Ted Hughes
"No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."
Criticism of Theology byLeonard M. Scigaj The 1961 poem Theology relates the possibility of a final transcendence to be accomplished by working through the alimentary coils of history, the serpent's dark intestine in the poem. Hughes revises biblical myth to portray Adam as first to eat the apple of experience, followed by Eve, the maternal principle of growth in nature. The serpent eats Eve, and then slopes off to a private paradise, oblivious and possibly superior to the queries of a peevish God:
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling.
The early serpent poems affirm a faith in man's involvement with nature in time and historical experience, and in his ability to wrest growth from her cyclic changes.
This poem provides an interesting point of view of life. In this poem, he is refferring to life, and that life is like living inside a snack. This essimistic view of life is very common in Ted's poetry. Also in the poem, I believe that he is saying the transcendence into heaven, is like making it out of the serpent. Overall, i found this poem to be very interesting and thought provoking.
Hawk Roosting by Ted HughesI sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Hughes’s response to the violence in his poetry: The poem of mine usually cited for violence is the one about the Hawk Roosting, this drowsy hawk sitting in a wood and talking to itself. That bird is accused of being a fascist ... the symbol of some horrible totalitarian genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It's not so simple maybe because Nature is no longer so simple. I intended some Creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature ... and Nature became the devil. He doesn't sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler's familiar spirit. There is a line in the poem almost verbatim from Job.
In this poem, the violence is obvious. The words that hughes uses scream death and violence. For example, he uses the words: perfect kills, kill, tearing of heads. However, i see the simple nature part of the poem as well. The hawk in the poem is talking to himself and talks about his surroundings and the territory he dominates.
Crow's Fall by Ted Hughes
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."
Ted Hughes: Overview
Hughes was always the poet of raw matter, and so it is appropriate that some of this material for poetry should be represented. The stories in Tales of the Early World offer Kiplingesque "mythlets" which playfully reclaim many biblical motifs ("your children shall inherit the whole earth"; "`I am what I am! screeched God"); and in "The Dancers" mountains literally labor to produce a mouse--a comic swipe at the decorums of poetic creation. Women matter in these tales--whether God's mother, the real brains of the outfit, or the human female whom God calls "`my favourite invention." The Horse emerging from the sea ("The Playmate") reminds one that form is implicit in matter which has made itself, here, into prose. The writing is shapelier for it, less dependent on pure faith. Wolfwatching, in its title poem and in "The Black Rhino," gestures to green issues: both pieces lament the erosion of animals' spirits. Much of the verse is explicitly formal and is willing to concede that "Metaphor/Fails the field of force." The poems have "the wild look of a hope/Returning from no man's land." Aptly, the elegies for uncles and a father in the aftermath of war and for Sylvia Plath are delicately understated. At such times Hughes's formal sense combines, in a postviolent mode, with a genuine power: "With all my might--I hesitated."Source: Stan Smith and James C.Q. Stewart, "Ted Hughes: Overview" in Contemporary Poets, 6th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 1996.
This poem shows Hughes telling of a myth that metophors for somthing today, for example, why the crow is black, like in "Crow's Fall." He simplifies something, from the way it is known today.
Born August 17th, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, his family moved to Mexborough when he was seven to run a newspaper stand and tobacco shop. He also attended Mexborough grammar school, and wrote his first poems from the age of fifteen, some of which made their way into the school magazine.
His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year he graduated from Cambridge. He used two false names for his early publications, Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew.
From 1955 to 1956, he worked as a rose gardener, night-watchman, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and reader for J. Arthur Rank, and planned to teach in Spain then emigrate to Australia. Hughes was also one of six producers of the literary magazines, St. Botolph's review, which was first launched on February 26. Hughes also met Sylvia Plath that day, and four months later, they were married.
Hughe's published his first book of poems, Hawk in the Rain, in 1957 and won the Harper publication contest.
Some of the awards Hughes received are the:
Harper publication contest, Guiness Poetry Award, Guggenheim fellowship, Somerset Maughan award, city of Florence International Poetry Prize, Premio Internazionale Taormina Prize, Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, OBE, vote for the best writing in English in the New Poetry Poll, Whitbread Book of the Year, W.H. Smith Literature award, Forward Prize for Poetry, Queen’s Order of Merit, T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, South Bank Award for Literature, Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Book of the Year again.
Ted Hughe's wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, after their separation in 1962. Some hold Hughes responsible for her death because of his many affairs, one of which was with Assia Wevill. Hughes was publicly silent on the subject for more than 30 years out of his sense of responsibility to protect his two children.
Quotes
‘Each image denotates another, so that the whole poem throbs’ – Edward Lucie Smith on Hughes’ poetry, British Poetry since 1945
imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which you are merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday- and things which are a deep part of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated from?’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are.’-Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
http://www.poemhunter.com/ted-hughes/biography/
Influences on His poetry
· His upbringing in Yorkshire
· Ted Hughes studied first English and then anthropology and archaeology. This created an interest in mythological systems which grew into a fascination with astrology, shamanism and hermeticism, these topics also had an influence upon his poetry.
· The death of his wife Sylvia influenced ted to write a series of poems on death
- His love of animals
Style· Usually written contrary to the prevailing style, Hughes's work has always been controversial.
· In Literary Review, Carol Bere says, "He has been dismissed as a connoisseur of the habits of animals, his disgust with humanity barely disguised; labeled a 'voyeur of violence,' attacked for his generous choreographing of gore; and virtually written off as a cult poet. . . . Others admire him for the originality and command of his approach; the scope and complexity of his mythic enterprise; and the apparent ease and freshness with which he can vitalize a landscape, free of any mitigating sentimentality."
· Shaw, "Hughes's enterprise is to examine the isolated and precarious position of man in nature and man's chances of overcoming his alienation from the world around him. In pursuit of these interests Hughes focuses frequently (and often brilliantly) upon animals."
"Ted Hughes." Poetryfoundation.org. 2010. Web. 1 Apr. 2010. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3344Style.
The Minotaur by Ted HughesThe mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.
That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.
'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,
'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?
The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.
Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.
Minotaur could be compared to the myth of Thesius, and Ted Hughes used this poem to make a translation of the play. Hughe's stresses Phedre's pathological disorder by saying ; "She no longer anguishes and burns, as in Racine, but has now become possessed, and sickens for Thesius."
http://www.accessohio.org/cgi-bin/geauga_authenticator.pl?barcode=23235001762298
I think that the poem Minotaur can be compared to the myth of Thesius, where he has relations with his mother. My main reasoning for this is the last stanza, "left your mother a dead end, brought you to the horned, bellowing grave of your risen father, and your own corpse in it." The last two lines signify that he is acting in the place of his father, because he is having relations with his mother.
Theology by Ted Hughes
"No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."
Criticism of Theology byLeonard M. Scigaj
The 1961 poem
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling.
The early serpent poems affirm a faith in man's involvement with nature in time and historical experience, and in his ability to wrest growth from her cyclic changes.
This poem provides an interesting point of view of life. In this poem, he is refferring to life, and that life is like living inside a snack. This essimistic view of life is very common in Ted's poetry. Also in the poem, I believe that he is saying the transcendence into heaven, is like making it out of the serpent. Overall, i found this poem to be very interesting and thought provoking.
http://www.accessohio.org/cgi-bin/geauga_authenticator.pl?barcode=23235001762298
Hawk Roosting by Ted HughesI sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Hughes’s response to the violence in his poetry:
The poem of mine usually cited for violence is the one about the Hawk Roosting, this drowsy hawk sitting in a wood and talking to itself. That bird is accused of being a fascist ... the symbol of some horrible totalitarian genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It's not so simple maybe because Nature is no longer so simple. I intended some Creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature ... and Nature became the devil. He doesn't sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler's familiar spirit. There is a line in the poem almost verbatim from Job.
Interview by Egbert Faas. Www.accessohio.org. Gale Literary Datebases. Web. 15 Apr. 2010. http://www.accessohio.org/cgi-bin/geauga_authenticator.pl?barcode=23235001762298.
In this poem, the violence is obvious. The words that hughes uses scream death and violence. For example, he uses the words: perfect kills, kill, tearing of heads. However, i see the simple nature part of the poem as well. The hawk in the poem is talking to himself and talks about his surroundings and the territory he dominates.
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."
Ted Hughes: Overview
Hughes was always the poet of raw matter, and so it is appropriate that some of this material for poetry should be represented. The stories in Tales of the Early World offer Kiplingesque "mythlets" which playfully reclaim many biblical motifs ("your children shall inherit the whole earth"; "`I am what I am! screeched God"); and in "The Dancers" mountains literally labor to produce a mouse--a comic swipe at the decorums of poetic creation. Women matter in these tales--whether God's mother, the real brains of the outfit, or the human female whom God calls "`my favourite invention." The Horse emerging from the sea ("The Playmate") reminds one that form is implicit in matter which has made itself, here, into prose. The writing is shapelier for it, less dependent on pure faith. Wolfwatching, in its title poem and in "The Black Rhino," gestures to green issues: both pieces lament the erosion of animals' spirits. Much of the verse is explicitly formal and is willing to concede that "Metaphor/Fails the field of force." The poems have "the wild look of a hope/Returning from no man's land." Aptly, the elegies for uncles and a father in the aftermath of war and for Sylvia Plath are delicately understated. At such times Hughes's formal sense combines, in a postviolent mode, with a genuine power: "With all my might--I hesitated."Source: Stan Smith and James C.Q. Stewart, "Ted Hughes: Overview" in Contemporary Poets, 6th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 1996.
This poem shows Hughes telling of a myth that metophors for somthing today, for example, why the crow is black, like in "Crow's Fall." He simplifies something, from the way it is known today.